Humans treating humans for illness or injury goes back much much further in our history than written records, so we have to study artifacts and the fossil record to learn about ancient medical practices. The oldest surgery we know about dates to more than 30,000 years ago, when a child's lower leg was amputated. The bones show evidence of deliberate cutting, plus healing, indicating that the patient lived for several years afterward. As amazing as that is, it doesn't tell the whole story. We don't have preserved evidence of soft tissue from people that far back, but we do know that early humans harnessed natural remedies even when we were Neanderthals. Still, "medical care" is defined by people taking care of other people, and there is evidence of early humans who wouldn't have survived long with the infirmities they were found to have unless others were caring for them. This evidence involves assumptions, because we don't know what that care involved. These practices could have happened long before we were humans. This video is shorter than it looks, as the last minute and a half are promotional.
Teams test the new emergency chutes from the pad 40 crew tower in Florida pic.twitter.com/rWVj7zaHp0
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 19, 2024
The commercial space industry is exploding, which is something that the private space exploration firm SpaceX knows well. It takes astronaut safety seriously and wants to be able to evacuate astronauts from the launch pad in a hurry if necessary.
Two weeks ago, we saw that NASA uses armored military vehicles for this purpose. SpaceX instead uses this rapid-deployment chute that quickly carries the 40 members of a launch pad team away from the pad and to the ground. It looks like fun! Chief Operations Officer Gwynne Shotwell personally tested it.
-via Super Punch
In the vast realm of science, there's no shame is answering a question with "I don't know." Well, except in a science class when you are tested on things you should have studied. The whole idea of science is to explore those things we don't yet know and we're doing pretty well when we can find any answers at all. But all new discoveries lead to more questions, so it's a never-ending quest to learn all we can about the universe we live in. Vox explores those questions and discoveries in their regular podcast called Unexplainable. While they explain plenty, there are quite a few questions that science has no definitive answer for yet.
These questions range from the cosmic to the mundane to the intriguing. How do we define "life"? Or conversely, how do we define "death"? Every time we think we might have an answer, something happens to bend our definitions out of existence. What effect does weed have on pregnancy? That's a sticky area to research, since both drug laws and child abuse laws keep possible subjects from participating. Are there living microbes on the moon? Astronauts who have been there left their poop behind in bags to save weight on liftoff, but we can't yet get there to check on them. Explore 17 as of yet unanswered questions in science at Vox. Each question is explained in text and also has the relevant podcast attached in case you want to learn more about a specific question.
Experimental medical treatments are scary enough, but imagining you underwent such treatments before we had germ theory or even proper anatomy classes. Someone would get an idea, and they would try it on a patient because the alternative was death. Or they would try it because it just seemed like a good idea, like the time doctors removed some blood from a patient, bathed it in UV rays, and put it back in. It worked, but not for the reasons they thought. The same with using wine in wounds or putting a fish on your head to cure a headache.
One strange treatment didn't last long. Between the development of heart surgery and the heart-lung machine, in 1954, live human bodies were used to keep a patient's blood circulating during heart surgery, taking on the blood-pumping duties for two people. This technique, call cross-circulation, was soon discontinued, not because it didn't work (because it did!), but because the heart-lung machine soon replaced it. Read about five medical treatments that sound bonkers but worked at Cracked.
(Image credit: Patrick J. Lynch)
Easter traditions vary widely among places that celebrate the holiday, and some can be pretty darn weird. One is the annual bottle kicking competition in the British village of Hallaton. The team from Hallaton competes with the people of nearby Medbourne to carry a "bottle" (actually three small wooden kegs) across two streams a mile apart. There is an old legend that explains the beginnings of the custom involving a miraculous hare that saved two women from a charging bull. Gratitude went to God, and not the hare, which was given to the church to be made into a pie for the poor. What does that have to do with bottle kicking? The story is a bit complicated, but it evolved into the annual competition between the two villages.
The competition has few rules, and resembles a melee. The festival surrounding the competition held each Easter Monday has been going for a couple of hundred years, but may be much older. Some consider bottle kicking to be the origin of rugby, which uses a ball shaped sort of like a keg, that Americans would recognize as a football. Read about the Easter sport of bottle kicking and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Michael Trolove/Bottle Kicking/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Each letter of the English alphabet has an origin story, and each one could fill a book. We don't have time for that, so linguist Olly Richards gives us the short version of all 26 letters. They start out as pictograms, which often having nothing at all to do with their modern usage. Then they get filtered through other languages, often ending with Greek and then Latin, but not always. And we learn about ancient cultures that didn't have certain sounds in their own language, but used those letters for something else. By the time we got our standard 26-letter alphabet, those origins were left behind in the mists of obscurity. By the time he's finished with all 26 letters, you will have a new respect for the people who dug all this up for us. -via Laughing Squid
A new series on AppleTV+ called Manhunt follows the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The first two episodes of the seven-episode miniseries are already available for streaming. The series focuses on John Wilkes Booth, of course, but also on Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was very close to the president and directed the search for Booth, involving both the Union Army and detectives from New York City. Stanton also offered $100,000 in reward money for the apprehension of Booth and two of his accomplices.
Despite the intense efforts of the federal government, Booth wasn't located until April 26, 12 days after the crime. How could a renowned actor, who face was recognizable up and down the Atlantic seaboard, kill the president in front of a theater full of people and evade capture for so long? It was because Booth had plenty of support from Confederates and Confederate sympathizers who were not ready to face the fact that they had lost the Civil War. Read the historical facts behind the show about the hunt for John Wilkes Booth at Smithsonian.
The company Figure has a robot that is powered by artificial intelligence, Open AI to be exact. Meet Figure 01. Now, we've seen humanoid robots perform some impressive feats, and we've held uncanny conversations with household assistants. But this robot combines both those abilities with super-smooth dexterity guided by his own vision, and logical reasoning when conversing with a human. You will notice a few things. This robot has learned to use the human "uh" in its language when there is a pause caused by information loading -just like we do. There's also a stutter at one point, which is just too human, especially when partnered with a natural inflection. Also notice that when it puts all the dishes together, at about 1:34, the robot shows a slight hesitation when the plate wobbles, and gives the rack a tiny shove to make sure it falls into place. It was a snap decision, probably unnecessary, but a much faster reaction than most decisions in the video. The only real "mistake" I see is that he identifies the dishes in the rack as a (singular) plate and (multiple) cups. If pluralizing nouns is its only language flaw, it's doing better than most humans.
Throughout the video, I was waiting for Figure 01 to say, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." But it did all the things, and seems almost human. The guy talking to him does, too. -via the Awesomer
Would you like try some python meat? We're told that it tastes like a mix of chicken and calamari.
ABC News reports on a recent study conducted by conservationist Patrick Aust and his colleagues about the sustainability of python meat production. They examined the farming of Burmese and reticulated pythons in Southeast Asia and concluded that the mass cultivation of pythons could be an efficient way to provide meat to more people.
Pythons mature rapidly, reproduce in huge quantities, and efficiently turn their food, such as wild rodents and fish meal, into harvestable meat. They are also more durable to extreme weather than mammals. So try a slice of snake. Maybe add some hot sauce because, Aust warns us, python meat can be a bit bland.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Florida Fish and Wildlife
The classic drinking bird toy is probably the closest thing we have to a perpetual motion machine, except that it will eventually run out of water. The action of the bird constantly dipping its beak in the water and then standing back up and then dipping again are due to the design of its glass body and the fluid dynamics of the methylene chloride inside. That's explained in the linked article and in this video. Pretty cool, huh?
But listen- there's also a gadget called a triboelectric nanogenerator that harvests electricity from a static charge that happens when two materials are rubbed against each other, like when you pet a cat or comb your hair. A team led by Professor Hao Wu of the South China University of Technology linked two triboelectric nanogenerator modules to the sides of a drinking bird. The movement of the bird, powered only by evaporating water, caused the materials to constantly rub together and produce electricity. The drinking-bird triboelectric hydrovoltaic generator, or DB-THG, ran for 50 hours straight and generated output of up to 100 volts, which is enough to power a range of electronic devices. This little miracle gadget is explained and shown in a video at New Atlas. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: RobinLeicester)
Wow, I forgot all about Smashmallow until this incredible read about "the Theranos of marshmallows."https://t.co/IRhuxYIJ6J
— Molly Longman (@MollLongman) March 15, 2024
Everyone has a story about a friend who ran a store or a service and had more customers than they could handle. You ask why they don't hire assistants or open a second location, and the answer is usually "I don't want to work that hard." That wasn't the case with Jon Sebastiani. He was born into mass market business and wanted to make his own mark and to change the way people ate. One of his big ideas was to sell artisanal marshmallows, the kind he saw in France, and make them an upscale snack with a variety of flavors.
It was difficult enough to find a small bakery to make his marshmallows by hand, but they were a hit. Sebastiani wanted to move into large-scale manufacturing. But there was no way to scale up hand-made marshmallows, and there was no factory or equipment that could handle large batches. That equipment had to be invented. Still, a deal was made, and he fired his small bakery. What could possibly go wrong?
The story of one business that went wrong is also the story of many other businesses that scaled up too soon and too fast. Read about the rapid rise and explosive bust of Smashmallow and find out why staying small is sometimes for the best. -via Nag on the Lake
Since I avoid sweet drinks, carbonated drinks, and cold drinks, one soda pop seems the same as all the others to me. People who drink soda pop would consider that sacrilege, since everyone has their favorite. Apparently, Diet Coke is particularly popular. Weird History Food explains why by going through the entire history of soda, especially diet sodas. The upshot is that a product's name is more crucial than what's in it.
Working at NASA back in the day we destroyed a $10k gold plated mirror trying to drill a hole in it for a Herriot cell.
— Josh McBee (@JkMcBee) March 6, 2024
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and it also appears that you can't have a career in chemistry without an embarrassing experience of breaking some expensive laboratory glass. Keith Hornberger is the chemistry director at a biotech firm, and he knows the feeling. His son felt bad about breaking a beaker in his high school chemistry class, so Hornberger wanted to make him feel better about it by showing him that it happens to everyone. More than a hundred stories rolled in of expensive lab whoopsies.
Yikes!
— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 17, 2024
It's not just beakers, either. Respondents have dropped and broken Geiger counters, microscopes, and thermometers. Or an entire rack of expensive glassware they just cleaned. Plus even the cheapest dropped beaker could be holding something very expensive that spilled, or something dangerous that caused a lot of damage. You can read the entire thread at Twitter, or X, or just the best of them at Chemistry World. -via Real Clear Science
Salt is an essential mineral in our diets, but almost all of us consume way more salt than we need, because we are programmed to crave it. The conventional wisdom is that too much salt raises our blood pressure, which raises the danger of heart attacks and stroke, because that's what we've always been told. However, there are other dangers in consuming too much salt.
Early civilizations discovered that salt is a natural food preservative, because it kills the microbes that spoil food. It was thousands of years later that we discovered our own digestive systems depend on a variety of microbes to function. This is what we call our gut biome. Now imagine the effect of too much salt in our food killing off the natural bacteria living inside us. Some of these bacteria interact with fiber to produce metabolites, which keep our blood vessels relaxed and reduce inflammation. And besides their effect on blood pressure, our microbiome helps to regulate other systems, like sugar processing and fat absorption.
So what can we do? Sure, we can put away the salt shaker, but it would help a lot to limit our intake of processed foods, which are loaded with salt, sugar, and fat to appeal to our tastes. Read about about the effect of salt on our gut biomes at the Conversation. -via Geeks are Sexy
(Image credit: Joseph Barillari)
In this animated short, two characters, Snif & Snüf we assume, encounter a circle and a square -which eventually becomes a "wreck-tangle" as they explore the possibilities. The story involves one-upmanship, selfishness, and learning to share. But while the story is rather cute, it's not the story that's the most remarkable thing about the cartoon. Snif & Snüf is a new animation by Michael Ruocco, but it evokes the early days of the medium, when the whole point of animation was to humorously illustrate things that cannot be done by live actors. The retro look is delightful. Another thing that's particularly impressive is the score. The cartoon has no dialogue, no words at all, but the music emphasizes every movement perfectly, which is rarely seen in modern animation. Ruocco's fans have been following the development of this cartoon on Twitter and are delighted to see the finished product. -via Metafilter
